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The 1967 film adaptation of ER Braithwaite’s novel To Sir, With Love directed by James Clavell and starring Sidney Poitier and Lulu.
Photograph: Allstar/Columbia

'Open the doors and let these books in' - what would a truly diverse reading list look like?

Following student calls for university English literature syllabuses to be ‘decolonised’, Hanif Kureishi, Arundhati Roy, Kamila Shamsie and other authors reflect on the debate and choose essential books by black and minority ethnic writers

Hanif Kureishi

I once wrote, “I didn’t know I was coloured until I went to school”, and it goes without saying it took me some time to work out what being “of colour” really meant. Along with many others, I’m still trying to work out what it means, and if I’ve grasped something, it was because of the libraries I visited as a kid and the books I found there. Many were American – Richard Wright, James Baldwin – but the British revelation was a short novel by an author I’d never heard of, ER Braithwaite.

This was To Sir, With Love, published at the end of the 1950s and the moving story of an educated, ex-air force Guyanese man unable to find work because of racism. He ends up teaching in a new-style “free” school in the East End. There he is racially insulted continually, and we soon understand how abuse works to keep a man in his place for fear he will become a human being who might demand the same pleasures and rights as his white masters. We see the everyday violence that conservatism requires to preserve itself, as well as his struggle to remain sane and decent in horrific conditions.

At this difficult time in the west, when racism is increasing and people are retreating into nationalism, populism and even white supremacy, if literature is to have any point for young people, it must be to examine and dismantle the structures that maintain white power. The literary is also the political. If we open the “canon”, we also open our minds.

The literary is political … ER Braithwaite. Photograph: Frank Martin for the Guardian

Arundhati Roy

Decolonisation is always a good idea – of course – but it’s a complicated one. “Postcolonial studies” implies that colonialism is definitely “post”. Is it? Whose colonisation of whom are we talking about?

Some countries have colonised other countries, some cultures have colonised other cultures, some races and castes have colonised and enslaved others, some languages have colonised other languages, some religions have eviscerated others, some ideologies have wiped out others, some genders have dominated and oppressed others.

The categories are infinite, the hierarchies complicated and intersecting, the project of domination ongoing.

For an English literature syllabus in Britain to entirely or at least radically “decolonise” itself would be an ambitious enterprise. But an argument for there to be greater diversity in the canon of what is considered “great literature” is surely unimpeachable.

If there are still institutions of learning that want their students to remain innocent of the myriad new ways of looking at old histories, at our fascinating present and our uncertain future, God help those young people.

Pankaj Mishra

To decolonise the English syllabus is not to claim racial victimhood or assert superior virtue; it is to expand the imagination of students of literature. Our experience of the world grows ever more complex; any syllabus, whether of history or literature, has to engage with that complexity. That this imperative has to be argued at all is one sign among many of the political and intellectual derangement induced by an imperial fantasy of self-sufficiency and proud isolation.

Writers as different as VS Naipaul and Arundhati Roy have long enriched the canon of literature in English. Our task today is to read and interpret many likely refinements of this canon, such neglected works as Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club, a 1964 novel of postcolonial Cairo and post-imperial London, that is as emotionally wise as it is politically shrewd, and also hugely enjoyable. Narrated by the aimless but acutely self-aware scion of a wealthy Cairene family, it is set in the 1950s – during the actual process of political decolonisation that exposed the corruption, ineptitude and hypocrisy of native elites as much as of their former imperial overlords. The postcolonial bourgeoisie had, while holding fast to its class privileges and caste prejudices, come to wear modern ideas – revolution, freedom, democracy, women’s rights – as a “mask”, the thing that hides “us from others”, as Octavio Paz wrote, and “also hides us from ourselves”. Beer in the Snooker Club fearlessly unmasks anti-imperialists as well as imperialists; it shows how their failures tragically compromised the political struggles and emotional lives of several generations.

Emotionally wise … Waguih Ghali

Kamila Shamsie

Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient is a great novel: great in its structure, its language, its characters, its intelligence, its engagement with history, its evocation of place, its sensuality, its humanity. How much of this is connected to the Asianness of its Sri Lankan-Canadian writer? Well, you could answer that question by pointing to the character of Kirpal “Kip” Singh, the Indian sapper who has defused bombs for the allied forces through the war only to feel betrayed, broken-hearted, by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – this is the crescendo of the novel, its moral core.

I don’t believe you have to be from Asia to write Kip. It just so happens that this novel that gives us Kip – among its many other gifts – was written by an Asian (who is also Canadian). If you are drawing up a list of novels that it’s essential to read and you leave off The English Patient, there is something very wrong with the direction in which you’re looking, and the way you define essentialness. This is the bottom line of the discussion, for me: if your eyes skew in a particular direction (geographically, ethnically, genderwise) in a search for greatness you miss out on much of what is unmissable in the world.

Engagement with history … Michael Ondaatje. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

Jackie Kay

I was lucky enough to go to Stirling University, not Cambridge, where in my first year, in 1979, I did a course on the Indian novel. It gave me a lifelong love for the work of Anita Desai – and it taught me early on to seek things out, to go to independent bookshops and find writers not easily available. I remember the arrival of the copies of Mulk Raj Anand’s Across the Black Waters into our seminar rooms in Stirling. They were ordered straight from India. What would I choose by Desai? Probably The Fire on the Mountain. It’s an astonishing portrait of a relationship between a great-grandmother, Nanda Kaul, and her secretive great-granddaughter, Raka, and has you on the edge of your seat.

I was lucky too, just after Stirling, to work for Sheba Feminist Press in the early 80s. We published Audre Lorde. I’d include the just published Your Silence Will Not Protect You; her voice is even more relevant to these times. I’d also have to add Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, or her short stories, Spunk. She is so fresh, though Their Eyes was first published in 1937 – it recently won the Cheltenham Booker.

I’d have to have any of Toni Morrison. I’d probably start with her first, The Bluest Eye. Pecola Breedlove is the unforgettable heroine. And I’d have Lara or The Emperor’s Babe by Bernardine Evaristo, a writer whose work always makes you look again at the form. And you couldn’t be without Ben Okri’s The Famished Road.

And if I was looking for books that changed me or opened my eyes, I’d have to have Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I could go on.

I’d have to add a groundbreaking poetry anthology along the way – The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse edited by Paula Burnett or Red: Contemporary Black British Poetry edited by Kwame Dawes – so that students could read a range of writers and find ones they like and seek them out. I’d put Grace Nichols’ I Is a Long-Memoried Woman on my syllabus. What a breath of fresh air that book was when it first came out in the 80s. So many fine poets I’d include: Daljit Nagra’s Look We Have Coming to Dover!, John Agard, Imtiaz Dharker. Fred D’Aguiar’s Mama Dot. Paul Gilroy’s There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack or the recently published Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge would make good reading alongside the novels and the poetry.

It would be hard not to have Diran Adebayo’s debut Some Kind of Black and Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales, a reworking of The Canterbury Tales. The tales we are not being told – these are the ones we ought to have an opportunity to read. And I’d have to include the book I am reading right now, the astonishingly powerful Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie, a contemporary reworking of Sophocles, a novel that explores the clashes between families and faith, that connects the modern world to the ancient one. I’d open the doors and let these books in.

Ahdaf Soueif

Throwing a few random English-language novels by non-white authors into a canon-filled curriculum seems to be inviting charges of, at least, tokenism. Graduate campaigner Lola Olufemi and the 160 other signatories to the Cambridge University open letter raise important concerns, and they make reasonable suggestions for a path forward. If their statement – that “the curriculum, taken as a whole, risks perpetuating institutional racism” – is taken seriously, as it should be, then a clear remedy is that Edward Said’s Orientalism and/or Culture and Imperialism should be required reading in English departments.

In their letter, the signatories advocate “ensuring that Edward Said’s Orientalism is as essential in preparation for the course as Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text”. To “decolonise the curriculum” you need to propose alternative ways of looking at the canon itself. Said’s great gift here is that he is as astute and appreciative a literary critic as he is a rigorous and unrelenting political anti-colonialist – and his discourse is never anything but unequivocally humanist. As the students’ letter says: “Edward Said teaches us that our histories are interconnected and intertwined.” Expose all students of English lit to Said’s critique of and love for English lit, then let them bring their own intelligence to bear on the texts and the possible worldly and critical approaches to them.

Margaret Busby

Beloved was inspired by a 19th-century newspaper cutting that Toni Morrison came across while editing an anthology in 1974. Since its publication 30 years ago it has deservedly won numerous accolades – including the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 1988, and being named by the New York Times in 2006 as the best work of American fiction of the last 25 years in a survey of writers, critics and editors.

Set in the aftermath of abolition, Morrison’s novel brilliantly explores to the utmost the possibilities of storytelling, intertwining the realist and supernatural in a way that challenges the 20th-century literary canon and is likely to impact indelibly on the reader. A shocking historical incident in the legacy of African Americans is re-memoried with a stillness of language that is in itself haunting, the whole contributing immeasurably to an understanding of the “60 million and more” lives lost to enslavement that is both dramatic, tragic and yet somehow cathartic.

Daljit Nagra

The debate started by Cambridge University students focuses on the inclusion, by the university’s English department, of “white male authors at the expense of all others”. I am interested in the fact that the word “authors” seems to have been interpreted by most commentators as “novelists”. While there are undoubtedly many outstanding BAME novelists who could, and should, be studied alongside the white canon, I would like to speak up for poets.

A global tradition exists of black and Asian poets who have written in English over recent centuries. I could suggest many outstanding poets of colour but will name a few who would enrich the “canon” with their aesthetic excellence and help to complicate it with their fresh ways of using English, a new cast of characters and different themes. They could complement and challenge the white canon with their realist views of previously exoticised settings. These authors might include Phillis Wheatley, Sarojini Naidu, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, Arun Kolatkar, Amiri Baraka, Lucille Clifton, Oodgeroo Noonuccal and, of course, Derek Walcott, whose Selected Poems should be required reading for any student of English literature.

Madeleine Thien

“How is it that one person can be in the presence of another person in pain and not know it – not know it to the point where he himself inflicts it, and goes on inflicting it?” wrote Elaine Scarry many years ago. Tsitsi Dangarembga’s literary masterpiece, Nervous Conditions, asks this question of individuals and families, and of the very structure of our societies.

Set in Rhodesia in the 1960s, the novel begins as Tambudzai Sigauke embarks on her education, one that will expand her existence but only if, little by little, she takes charge of the dissolution of her own personhood. Imprisonment camouflaged as emancipation, education bartered for submission, a portrait of the artist, a reckoning with contempt towards others and ultimately ourselves, Dangarembga somehow finds a language that collides coming into being with the state of not being. This masterful novel, alive and historical and prescient, about a young woman who wants to believe that the world can make room for her if only she learns to speak its codes, is a book for our times.

At its publication in 1988, when Dangarembga was 28 years old, Nervous Conditions won the admiration of Alice Walker and Doris Lessing, who wrote: “This is the novel we have all been waiting for … it will become a classic.”

Prescient … Tsitsi Dangarembga. Photograph: J Countess/WireImage

Amit Chaudhuri

“Decolonisation” of the literature syllabus in British universities is long overdue, but decolonisation, for me, implies not just corrective action, but an opportunity to rethink the literary: to reconsider its emergence among, and importance to, various communities, western and eastern, in the last two centuries. Decolonisation is to relearn the fact that the history of colonised cultures is not part of the history of colonisation alone, but of modernism and radical experimentation. Decolonisation means that we – white, pink, black, brown and other variously coloured writers – are invited to put to one side the cliches of thought we’re accustomed to.

These two books are random, not definitive, choices, from Bengali and Kannada, though they are available in English translation. The first is Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay’s novel Pather Panchali, published in 1928, two years after Mrs Dalloway, and as much a departure in narrative technique as Woolf’s novel. It’s a portrait of village life in Bengal, but is as distant from the dutiful social realism such a project would normally entail as Mrs Dalloway is from a 19th-century-style study of upper-class society. Pather Panchali is an experiment in exploring how narrative might follow the momentary transitions of our consciousness of the world.

UR Ananthamurthy’s short Kannada novel, Samskara, was published in 1965. The idea for the book came to him in Bristol, when he went to see Bergman’s The Seventh Seal with his PhD supervisor, Malcolm Bradbury. The film, which had no subtitles, reminded Ananthamurthy of his village; Samskara came out of this interface of memory, image and language. It’s about a Brahmin who suddenly finds himself on the fringes of society; it exudes the sense of exile that Heart of Darkness had, but the itinerant here, unlike Marlow, is a man at once local and estranged. Beautifully translated by AK Ramanujan and Manu Shetty, it embodies the shared hybrid history that decolonisation may uncover.

Bernadine Evaristo

Buchi Emecheta (1944-2017) was a trailblazing Nigerian woman novelist who lived most of her life in Britain. Long before the new generation of African women writers emerged, she published more than 20 books, primarily focused on African female characters. The Joys of Motherhood, published in 1979, is a feminist classic for its portrayal of a Nigerian woman, Nnu Ego, whose entire life is spent wrestling with the pressures and limitations of how she should live her life as a wife and mother. It is a shocking, profound and captivating novel that deserves pride of place on university reading lists.